With sheet printing machines, it is well-known that they pull in the sheet(s) being printed from a shingle flow. Here a pivoting gripper grabs the forward edge of the sheet to be pulled in and accelerates it to the cycling speed of the rotary sheet printing machine. A sheet pick-up roller which exhibits one or several roller grippers disposed on its circumference takes up the accelerated sheet from the pivoting gripper with the aid of the roller gripper. The sheet picked up is then further fed by the sheet pick-up roller over some angular sector and finally transfers it, precisely aligned and at cycling speed to the gripper of the rotating printing cylinder.
By way of example, within the scope of the rotary manufacture of folded-box blanks made of sheets of cardboard or pulp sheet, it is advantageous—due to their proportionally high bend strength if compared to paper sheet—to feed in the sheets as straight a line as possible to suction belts at least in that area of the rotary machine in which precise alignment is important. No proposals are known to date in prior art for the type and manner of the precisely-aligned pulling in of sheets to a suction belt.